Kunai
by iflip4dolphins
Summary: Tenten needs to tell him how she feels. Neji needs to admit that he loves her. Can they do it? NejiTen


**Disclaimer: This show is not mine. Nor are its characters. I'm just messing with their minds for a bit.**

**Notes: Yay! I finally got a NejiTen story written1 Now Serenity Sichan can't kill me! Joking aside, this is my longest oneshot in forever. Go me. **

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Whap! Tenten hurled another kunai at the weapon-littered tree. If she ever got her hands on Ino, that girl would be dead. Well, maybe not dead. Just very, very close. She'd drive her to insanity, but Tenten was pretty sure that her friend was already as close to insane as she was going to get. Why else did she poke her nose into everyone else's business all the time? With a clunk a mace joined the rapidly growing array of weapons embedded in the tree. It was getting quite crowded.

Neji was looking for Tenten. He had a pretty good idea of where to find her; she liked to go to the training grounds a lot. They trained there together often, but Neji knew that his teammate liked to train a lot of her own. The Hyuuga headed over to the training grounds, hoping that his guess was right.

Of course it was. It was sad how well he knew her by now. They were teammates and should know each other pretty well after about four years, but this was getting close to the line of ridiculous. Neji watched as she threw multiple weapons at an elderly tree, the wood strong and supple. Something had made her angry. For some reason, thinking about someone making Tenten angry or hurt lit a fire in his stomach. Neji ignored the feeling.

"What are you doing?" he asked from a safe distance away.

Tenten didn't hear her companion. Not really, anyway. She was so furious at Ino that all she heard was a voice. She didn't hear words, tone, or anything. Just a collection of sounds. To her angry mind, it sounded much higher than it actually was. "No!" she snapped, not bothering to look.

After about thirty seconds, Tenten felt something else. The blood in her ears calmed, and she could tell that she had said the wrong thing. Apparently it wasn't Ino come to bug her again. "Yes?" she tried tentatively.

Again, no answer. The weapons mistress began to feel like she had horribly messed up. Not that that meant she was embarrassed - just that she had better explain what she meant to whoever had spoke. Collecting herself, the kinoichi took a deep, calming breath before starting all over, turning around as she spoke.

"Sorry. Could you repeat that again? I wasn't -" Tenten cut off abruptly as she saw Neji standing there. Her eyes seemed magnetically drawn to the ground at this point.

Neji was confused. However, being the person that he was, the Hyuuga kept the flood of confusion inside his mind, not letting his face change at all. Carefully he pushed back all confusion he felt. It would probably be better to clarify things. Neji couldn't help but notice that her cheeks were a shade pinker than normal and that her eyes were studying the uninteresting grass. These were both signs of embarrassment. Now why should she be embarrassed?

"I wanted to know what you were doing," he repeated, gesturing at the poor, pummeled tree.

Neji's gaze was somehow drawn to Tenten's right hand. It was so smooth, small, and slender, with such soft looking skin. Neji immediately washed away those thoughts. He shouldn't be thinking like that. The said white hand twitched slightly. That was a sign of nervousness. Nervous and embarrassed at the same time. Hmm.

Before he had time to ponder why his teammate was both nervous and embarrassed at the same time, Tenten's voice broke into his head.

"Training," she said shortly. Neji raised one eyebrow.

"Right."

Tenten could feel heat rising up in her cheeks. She turned around so that Neji wouldn't see the rapid coloring, but he'd probably already seen it. Even standing this close to him made her blush. _That_ ought to be useful in a mission someday. The thing was, she was mad at Ino because her friend was right. She did like Neji, and more than she should. But still. Ino had no right to just butt into her own personal affairs like that.

"Come on, what were you doing?" Neji's voice interrupted what was turning out to be a nice long rant her head about how her friend's were not nice. There was just a hint of a smile behind the words.

Tenten was torn between wanting to get as far away as possible from him and getting closer than friends normally got. The first one won. Tenten moved away from him and went over to the tree. As she tugged out a kunai, she called back, "Nothing."

As she said this she had to fight a strange, sudden, and overwhelming urge to run back and fling her arms around him. Tenten had even taken a few steps back before winning the battle.

This, of course, confused Neji more than ever. On top of trying to figure out why his teammate had such conflicting feelings and attempting to find out what she had been doing here in the first place, this answer was just so unlike her. Tenten didn't lie. Not to him at least. He found this refreshing; many people disliked telling the truth. He was always certain he could get it from Tenten.

"Hn. What was the 'no' about?" he tried a different approach, keeping all emotion besides curiosity out of his voice. Including the sudden want he had to go up to her and hold that soft-looking hand.

Wait.

What?

_Watch it, Hyuuga,_ he warned himself. _Knock it off. You're going too killed if you keep this up. Besides, you shouldn't be thinking about your teammate this way. Now get in gear._

Tenten sighed as a shiver went up her spine at the sound of his deep voice. Then she sighed again, this one more of an exasperated sigh. "I thought you were Ino. She's been bugging me all day about -" again Tenten clamped her mouth shut. No way could she say what she had been planning on saying next. No. Way.

Focusing much more intently on removing a shuriken than she needed to, Tenten ignored the footsteps that came up to her. And then the shuriken was out and in the hand of Neji. He passed the potentially deadly ninja weapon to her. Tenten took it, and held on for slightly longer than she needed to before pulling it away and slipping it in her shuriken holder.

"Thanks," she mumbled.

"You're welcome," Neji replied, studying her intently. She was still pink. It made her look prettier than she was before. Neji turned to face the tree and again started to pull out weapons before he blushed.

Before he had walked over there, Neji had come to a conclusion. There were only two things that could make a person act like that: hate and love. Neji had an inkling that Tenten would handle hate much differently, but those were the only two things it could be. And seeing as how this hadn't started until she'd seen him, it had to have been him. So, either she loved him, or she hated his guts. One of those prospects was just far to horrifying to think about.

But now, standing next to her, helping her pull out the weapons, realization hit him like a bag of shuriken. She loved him. It was in everything she did, the blushes, the slight hand movements, the mumbles. Neji wasn't even sure if he'd ever heard Tenten mumble in his life before that. Come to think of it, that's probably what had made her so angry in the first place. She'd said something about Ino. The nosy girl had probably been annoying her about him. Why she couldn't keep her nose to herself, Neji had no clue.

Nearly all the weapons had vanished into Tenten's summoning scrolls and weapon stashes. There was only one left. Neji absentmindedly, thinking about how very, very soft Tenten's skin looked, reached for the kunai. At the exact same time as Tenten.

Tenten hadn't been paying much attention either. Her mind was attempting to focus on the weapons, but there was one fact that wouldn't allow her too. Neji. He was standing right next to her. That one factor of her life that she had hated at first, then grown used to it, and eventually these feelings had shown up just to complicate her life. He hardly ever showed how he felt, least, not towards people. Just her luck she'd fallen in love with a guy who probably thought of her as a teammate and a sparring partner, nothing more.

This occupying her thoughts, she didn't realize that Neji was reaching for the last kunai at the same time she was. Tenten got there first, hand closing around the handle. A split second later another hand reached the kunai. Actually, this wasn't entirely accurate. The second hand didn't reach the kunai, it reached her own hand, probably because her hand was already wrapped around the handle.

Tenten followed the hand up with her eyes to see who had placed it there, though she already knew. Sure enough, the owner of the hand was Neji, who had done the same thing with her hand. The end result was that they both ended up looking right into each other's faces. Tenten could feel her cheeks heat up with a fresh blush.

Neji watched as her cheeks reddened. As if following a mind of their own, his eyes involuntarily traveled across her face, taking in every detail, tracing mentally over her cheekbones, her lips, her eyes. He found himself unreasonably wanting to trace her face with more than just his eyes, to actually touch her cheekbones with his hands and fingers. It was then, thinking about hands and attempting to bury the completely irrational idea that had sprouted in his head that he realized that their hands were still touching.

And then they were hugging, embracing each other in the gentlest hug in ninja history. How this had happened was a mystery to Neji; one moment he was looking at Tenten's deep brown eyes, the next he had his arms around her and she had hers around him. It was at that moment that Neji was hit with a realization that, if it were a physical blow and not a mental thought, would have knocked him over.

He loved her.

And she loved him.

And that was the way things should be.


End file.
